MATH6040: Winter 2017, Week 5

I am emailing a link of this to everyone on the class list every week. If you are not receiving these emails or want to have them sent to another email address feel free to email me at jpmccarthymaths@gmail.com and I will add you to the mailing list.

Test 1 Results & Comments

Have been emailed to you along with the marking scheme.

I want to make the following remarks. Below we have a plot of Final Grade vs Test 1 Mark for last year’s class.

Everyone under the horizontal line failed MATH6040. Note the students in the bottom right. They got ~70% and ~80% in the Vectors test and still failed. There were various students with ~55-100% in Vectors who barely passed. On average, the final grade was about 0.6 times the Test 1 Result + 8. This means that on average students with below 53% on Test 1 failed MATH6040. That is people to the left of the vertical line.

Therefore, note vectors is the easiest chapter in MATH6040 so don’t get too carried away with your mark. Conversely, if you have done poorly you need to take immediate action: by attending all your tutorials and possibly the Academic Learning Centre. The three students in the top left would have taken this advice. The seven students in the bottom left would not have.

The second thing to note about the results is the impact of attendance on grades. On average:

those with satisfactory attendance got 74% — a distinction

those with one attendance warnings got 63% — a merit 1

those with two attendance warnings got 37% — a FAIL

The third thing to note is that perceived ability is not as important as attendance. Of those who attended the quick test, the correlation coefficient between Quick Test mark and Test 1 mark was only 0.27 while the correlation coefficient between Attendance Warnings and Test 1 mark was -0.59.

Roughly, this suggests that attendance is twice as important as ability.